


Which old sayings are true and which are false? – Barking up the wrong tree

Let’s go ahead and insert the “studies say” caveat, but there’s a lot of interesting stuff here. Selections:

“All _____ people look alike”

For all of us, whenever people are a different race it’s harder to tell them apart.



“You can tell a lot about a man by his handshake”

Absolutely. “Results showed that HGS was correlated with SHRs, aggressive behavior, age at first sexual intercourse, and promiscuity in males but not in females. HGS appears to be an honest signal for genetic quality in males.”

“Happy wife, happy life”

When the husband is happier than the wife, couples are more likely to divorce.



“Attractive women make men stupid”

True. In fact, just thinking about attractive women makes men dumb.

“It’s the booze talking”

No, actually, that’s you talking.

“Spanking is bad for kids”

Kids who were spanked behave better as teenagers.




JERRY: Okay.

ELAINE: Want to go get something to eat?

JERRY: Where do you want to go?

ELAINE: I don’t care, I’m not hungry.


ELAINE: What are we gonna do there? Talk?

JERRY: We can talk.

ELAINE: I’ll go if I don’t have to talk.

File under: boredom, introverts.

Country Music, Openness to Experience, and the Psychology of Culture War | Big Think

What high-openness liberals feel as mere nostalgia, low-openness conservatives feel as the baseline emotional tone of a recognizably decent life. If your kids don’t experience the same meaningful things in the same same way that you experienced them, then it may seem that their lives will be deprived of meaning, which would be tragic. And even if you’re able to see that your kids will find plenty of meaning, but in different things and in different ways, you might well worry about the possibility of ever really understanding and relating to them. The inability to bond over profound common experience would itself constitute a grave loss of meaning for both generations. So when the culture redefines a major life milestone, such as marriage, it trivializes one’s own milestone experience by imbuing it was a sense of contingency, threatens to deprive one’s children of the same experience, and thus threatens to make the generations strangers to one another. And what kind of monster would want that?



Forer effect – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

And now I know the name for this. (via)

The Forer effect (also called the Barnum Effect after P.T. Barnum’s observation that “we’ve got something for everyone”) is the observation that individuals will give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically for them, but are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people. This effect can provide a partial explanation for the widespread acceptance of some beliefs and practices, such as astrology, fortune telling, and some types of personality tests.

Forer effect – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia